Sphere Of Religion Research Articles

Santos Populares no Brasil: Catolicismo e Misticismo

The Brazilian Catholicism exhibits several mystical elements which show the influence of miscigenation on religion, language and culture. During the Portuguese colonization, the Catholic cult was impenetrable to the most of people. To surpass linguistic obstacles set by the Latin, white, black and indian associated ancient beliefs and external displays of faith (as processions) in order to take part in the religion. This blend of different elements resulted in religious syncretism. The legends about saints' supernatural abilities, besides the comparison between African divinities created a good environment to a great cult of Saints and the powers attributed to them. Among the most popular saints in Brazil are Saint Anthony, the twins Cosmas and Damian and Saint George. Despite the fact that nowadays Catholic Mass and rites are spoken in Portuguese, this belief in personal contact with the supernatural sphere of religion is common in Brazilian everyday life, being the prayers and the procession the climax of religious feeling. The best-known Portuguese saint, Anthony (born Fernando de Bulhoes) carries a series of legends around his life and abilities. Born in Lisbon in 1195, Anthony died in Italy in 1231. His worshippers believe he helps people to find lost things, to find a love, to help someone to marry, to protect animals and so on. George was a soldier to the Roman Empire during the reign of Diocletian, Emperor who persecuted Cristians. He was converted to Chritianity and was tortured and beheaded. The martyrdom of George occured in April, the 23 th in 303 A.D. This date is his feast day. In Brazil, Saint George is largely associated to the African orishacalled Ogun. The Warrior Saint is invoked as protector from all kinds of evil. The twins Cosmas and Damian were born in Arabia in the 3rd century AD and were executed around 287 AD. In Brazil , Cosmas and Damian were associated by the African entities called ibeijis, being regarded as protectors of children. Their feast day is celebrated in the Roman Catholic Church in September 26 since 1969, but their believers continue to celebrate the former date, September 27. The afro-religious temples use to receive children in order to bless them and offer candies for them. In the big cities take place many Festas de Cosme e Damiao . Besides this, many common people use to informally, outside any cult, offer childrenlittle toys and candies in the streets or even organize feasts by their own. According to the tradition, to please a child makes Cosmas and Damian (or the African entities) bring good luck to the host. The oldest church in Brazil (built in Igarassu, Pernambuco, in 1535) was honored to the twins.

Globalization, Ethics, and the ‘War on Terror’

This article serves as a lead-in to the special issue and reflects on the relationship between globalization, ethics, and the ‘war on terror’. It argues that while globalization studies have focused substantially on the marketization of life, including the realms of politics and culture, the current ‘war on terror’ phase has directed focus in theory and practice back to traditional state-centred security concerns and critical investigation of state–citizen relations, notably in the context of multicultural societies. The article discusses three key areas of ethics. First those connected to the terminology of ‘war’ in this context and the applicability of just war thinking; second, the challenge of such rhetoric to core values of liberal democracies, such as equality and impartiality; and third, the consequences for the division between the political and public spheres and the supposedly private spheres of religion and culture. Este artículo sirve como introducción al asunto en particular y se refleja en las relaciones entre la globalización, la ética y “la guerra contra el terror”. Sostiene que mientras los estudios sobre la globalización se han enfocado sustancialmente en la marquetización de la vida, que incluye los dominios de la política y la cultura, la fase actual de la ‘guerra contra el terror’ ha regresado el enfoque en teoría y práctica a los asuntos tradicionales de seguridad del estado centralizado y de investigación crítica sobre las relaciones entre el estado y los ciudadanos, particularmente en el contexto de las sociedades multiculturales. El artículo plantea tres áreas claves de ética. Primero, aquellos conectados a la terminología de ‘guerra’ en este contexto y la aplicabilidad del simple pensamiento de guerra; segundo, el reto de semejante retórica a los valores fundamentales de las democracias liberales, tales como la igualdad y la imparcialidad; y tercero, las consecuencias de la división entre las esferas políticas y públicas y las esferas supuestamente privadas de la religión y de la cultura.

On enlightenment and taste: Outline of a research topic

The author puts forward a set of assumptions and possible context for examining the connection between the concepts of enlightenment and taste. Kant?s definition of enlightenment is accepted, with special emphasis on the sphere of religion. Applying this criterion, we may discern a powerful and influential religious current stemming from strictly speaking Church circles that denies the systematic and historical significance of the opus of Dositej Obradovic, who in his time was a protagonist of the European enlightenment. Such a revaluation has been accepted by the greater portion of the younger generation, which relies predominantly on the St. Sava Myth. With a change of worldview, undoubtedly, tastes change as well. The next section of the paper discusses the approach to taste of the Scottish philosopher David Hume representative of dispositional aesthetic. Finally it is argued that music as one of the arts, might be exemplary for appraising the condition of enlightenment in a society.

How Church and Mosque Influence the Media of Albania

To begin with, for Albanians, the very concept of religious affiliation is in itself problematic. Albanian society reflects a multi-faith environment within which those of Muslim religious origin are in the majority. That said, all this must be correctly interpreted. For it is true that there are today a good number of Albanians, particularly of younger age, for whom the traditionally tolerant and non-militant form of Islam practised in Albania still commands respect as the religion of their ancestors, while yet no longer constituting a set of personal religious beliefs for them.

Different Paths, Different Summits: A Model for Religious Pluralism (review)

Reviewed by: Different Paths, Different Summits: A Model for Religious Pluralism John B. Cobb Jr. Different Paths, Different Summits: A Model for Religious Pluralism. By Stephen Kaplan. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. Pp. xi + 187. Those of us who believe that religious traditions are radically different from one another are divided between two camps. One camp holds that they are simply incommensurable. Participants in this camp often emphasize the decisive importance of language. They may argue that each language creates its own world within which every part of the symbolic system has its meaning in its relation to other parts of the system. Since language does not refer to a nonlinguistic reality, there is no possibility of translation among languages. Some who recognize the possibility of translation for some parts of the linguistic systems still reject any such possibility in the sphere of religion. It is in this sphere that the denial that language has nonlinguistic reference is most firmly insisted upon. It is urged that each religious system is simply what it is. The second group, the one to which I belong, holds that religious language does have referential character, and that dialogue, although complex and difficult, is possible and fruitful. But against those who hold that all religions are speaking, in their very diverse ways, of the same reality, we hold that the reality to which reference is made is multiple or diverse. It is our belief that the concrete and detailed study of religious experience and of the language through which it comes to expression enables us to distinguish these diverse references. To the best of my knowledge, Stephen Kaplan has written the first book-length argument in favor of this view. He entitles it, quite appropriately, Different Paths, Different [End Page 367] Summits. The contrast, of course, is with the common image of different paths up a single mountain to the same summit. Those of us who take this approach do not believe that every religious path leads to a different summit. Whether two paths lead to the same or different summits is to be decided on the basis of careful study of the traditions that follow these paths. Kaplan develops a threefold typology. One path is that of the theists, who seek communion with God. Another is that of Advaita Vedānta, which aims at final identity with the changeless real. A third is that of many forms of Buddhism, which seek to realize the wholly processive and interconnected character of all reality including the self. Kaplan rightly emphasizes his agreement with those who stress the importance of language and culture in shaping religious experience as well as its articulation. He does not take this to mean that we cannot discern families of experience, such as the experiences of those who seek communion with God. The experiences of those with this goal in diverse traditions differ in their imagery. The language used to speak of the experience is that of a particular community. But the judgment that what constitutes experience in multiple communities is theistic reality fits many of them. There are thus several paths to the same summit. But not all religious paths are directed to this theistic summit. Kaplan understands that a main objection to this radical religious pluralism is the deep-seated assumption that reality cannot have more than one fundamental character. If it is theistic, then the Hindu and Buddhist versions are in error. If either of them is correct, then all differing views are illusory. To adopt a radical pluralism is, then, in principle, to force a profound choice among religious traditions, holding that two out of three groups of traditions fail to provide paths up any mountain at all. Kaplan responds to this objection thoughtfully and thoroughly. He finds in David Bohm's holographic model a clue to how three very different views of reality may all be justified by one reality. Bohm holds that the hologram illustrates and embodies the distinction between the implicate and the explicate orders. The implicate order is represented by the plate on which are inscribed the results of laser beams. When these are projected they give rise to an explicate order of...

Calvin and other religions: research

Widely differing views on ways leading to true knowledge of God is at present characteristic of discussions in the sphere of religion. Although Calvin worked in a completely different scene, he has laid down certain principles based on his interpretation of Holy Scripture that may contribute to current theological thought on this issue. In this article his views on true and false religion, non-Christian faiths, the uniqueness of Christ as Mediator and Redeemer, and universalism is discussed from the perspective not only of his Institutes, but also of his Commentaries, Tracts and Treatises and Letters. His conviction is that careful observation of God's Word leads to the principle of Christ as the only way to God. Any kind of self-invented religion, even though it is the result of an appeal by God's general revelation on the sensus divinitatis in mankind, leads to idolatry. Acta Theologica Vol.24(1) 2004: 147-167

No Longer Odd Region Out: Repositioning Latin America in World History

��� The history of Latin America has been instrumental to the rise of world history as a research field. Some of the seminal works of world history have highlighted Latin American‐centered events, from William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples to Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange. The region has also provided important subject matter for groundbreaking studies on topics that have become the bread and butter of global historians: diasporas, transnational movements, and the rise of global capitalism. It might seem, then, that the relationship between Latin American history and world history has been a close one and that the two fields have informed each other more than they have developed in isolation. Yet the reality is both more complex and more troubling. In the main paradigms of world history, Latin America has been placed not in the foreground, but off to the side, inhabiting a space that is not so much insignificant as it is simply strange. Many comparative analyses have cast the region as a contrast to patterns of change that in turn take on the character of historical models. Together, the trends produce a tendency to view the continent as “odd region out”— home to anomalous processes and perpetually out of sync with global historical periodization. Curiously, emphasis on the region’s oddities is perhaps most muted in the historiography of the precolumbian period. Here, though we might expect exceptionalism to attach itself to representations of Aztec and Incan Empires as, at the very least, technologically different from their counterparts in other world regions, historians and anthropologists have instead operated largely within a comparative framework that emphasizes shared structures of symbolic practices, social hierarchies, and agricultural regimes.1 The treatment of later

Carefully Chosen Words on Antievolutionism

The November 2003 decision of the Texas State Board of Education to reject demands made by antievolutionists is good news for science. However, the report of this decision in the December issue of Physics Today (page 36) uses language that will offend some supporters of evolution and could be useful to the enemies of science.The article refers to the textbook critics as “antievolutionist,” “creationist,” and “social conservative.” The first two terms are pertinent, since those critics are challenging the correctness of evolution and promoting creationism or intelligent design as alternatives. The term “social conservative” is irrelevant and misleading.A social conservative may be a supporter of evolution, an opponent of evolution, or a person who is unconcerned about evolution. The number of physicists and readers of Physics Today who think of themselves as social conservatives is not negligible. Use of this characterization gives the appearance of criticizing supporters and potential supporters based on unrelated considerations. Thoughtless language is poor public relations.The introduction of social and political terminology into the December story aids dangerous opponents of science. The following words, written by science historian Michael Riordan, appear on page 51 of the August 2003 issue of Physics Today: “Without such a rigorous standard of truth, science will have little defense against the onslaughts of the creationists and postmodernists, for whom it is just one of many ways to grasp the world.” Darwinian evolution is included in the biology curriculum because it is the accepted scientific interpretation of biological facts. Injecting social and political considerations supports the claim of postmodernists that the conclusions of science are socially determined.Science cannot avoid interaction and conflict with various forces in society. Riordan’s statement calls attention to threats that confront science from two different sources—postmodernism and religious fundamentalism. In addressing these threats, I urge consideration of the following facts. First, postmodernism is a threat to both science and religion. Second, within the sphere of religion, only fundamentalism is a consistent opponent of science. Most people who believe in God accept science as true and regard as allegorical those elements of the Bible that conflict with science. Third, belief systems are not always based on religion—social conservatism is an example—and do not necessarily determine a person’s view of science.Science might have more support if its institutions and centers of power were more diplomatic. I offer two recommendations. First, avoid linking science concerns with unrelated social and political disagreements. Second, when communicating about public issues of concern to both science and religion, avoid extending the conflict with religious fundamentalism to include religion in general.Stephen Hawking’s immensely successful book A Brief History of Time (Bantam Books, 1988) provides an outstanding example of how to achieve that second objective. His text presents physics to a general audience in a manner that avoids showing disrespect for religion and demonstrates sensitivity to its concerns. Perhaps some eminent biologist will write A Brief History of Life in the same spirit.© 2004 American Institute of Physics.

Permission to Speak: Religious Arguments in Public Reason

In an important late essay John Rawls acknowledges the development in the Catholic Church’s attitude to politics. 1 He recognizes elements of the Catholic intellectual heritage and the contribution which it might make to political discourse, relying on the notions of natural law, common good and solidarity, as presented by authors drawing on that tradition. While acknowledging the development that has taken place, Rawls also reminds the reader of the problems that form the background to the emergence of political liberalism. A persecuting zeal has been the great curse of the Christian religion. It was shared by Luther and Calvin and the Protestant Reformers, and it was not radically changed in the Catholic Church until Vatican II. In the Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom – Dignitatis Humanae – the Catholic Church committed itself to the principle of religious freedom as found in a constitutional democratic regime. It declared the ethical doctrine of religious freedom resting on the dignity of the human person; a political doctrine with respect to the limits of government in religious matters; and a theological doctrine of the freedom of the Church in its relations to the political and social world. All persons, whatever their faith, have the right of religious liberty on the same terms. y As John Courtney Murray, S.J., said: ‘A longstanding ambiguity had finally been cleared up. The Church does not deal with the secular order in terms of a double standard – freedom for the church when Catholics are in the minority, privilege for the Church and intolerance for others when Catholics are a majority.’ 2 The background to this acknowledgement has been an ongoing conversation, conducted mostly in the United States of America, about the role of religion in public life. In the literature of this conversation, religious thinkers recognize that philosophical liberalism as it is found in the American polity is hospitable to religion in public life, at least to the extent of being tolerant. 3 Finding themselves at home in the public space, these thinkers investigate the appropriate role of religious language and what religion has to contribute. Of course there is an acceptance of some separation and some difference, so that the rules of participation in the two spheres of religion and politics are different. Out of this literature has

The Secular Faith Controversy: Religion in three dimensions

In this volume Edward Bailey sets out what is meant by without constraints either of total academic impersonality or of excessive compression. He suggests how concept of implicit religion can help us understand contemporary scene, other people and ourselves. He also suggests what this approach might add to religious and social studies. The book spans spectrum from religious studies to ordinary life. Part I describes issues or problems experienced by practitioners, by leaders and by students of religion while Part II describes some of main ways in which those three (overlapping) groups have responded to those issues. Part III describes possible alternative responses. Part IV describes three dimensional model of religion, and Part V, three dimensions of human and religious experience. Part VI applies this model in spheres of religion, of spiritual and of life. Indeed, three dimensions of title are the sacred, the holy and the human.

BELIEVING AND BELONGING: SECULARISM AND RELIGION IN INDIA

On the front lines of the world's conflicts, amid the noxious fumes of ancient hatreds, men and women gather in cratered roads and sniper alleys, and embrace. It was always Ormus Cama's hope that it might be possible for human beings -- for himself -- to transcend the frontier of skin, not to cross the colour line but to rub it out. (1) Introduction: The nation and its discontents During the last few months, India has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. The world has witnessed with horror another outbreak of violence and brutality between members of different religious communities in the state of Gujarat, the same state from which the apostle of non-violence, Mahatma Gandhi, came. Neighbours have turned into fanatics; the home has turned from a place of refuge to a killing field; carefully fostered relationships and shared joys and sorrows have evaporated in a frenzy of bloodshed and hatred. Pent-up hatred has burst from behind the facade of civility, revealing the frightening face behind the mask. The iron under the velvet has been exposed. This reality is all the more disturbing and troubling because India has been a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious land for more than three millennia. Indeed, India has been described as a laboratory of dialogue, where people of different religious persuasions and faiths have lived and worked side by side for generations. This is not to deny the reality that there have been clashes and violence down the ages. There have been very violent episodes, not only in the past but also in recent history. For example, the partition of the country about fifty years ago led to one of the great human tragedies after the end of the second world war. What sears the imagination are the pictures of burnt-out shops and homes, bodies lying twisted grotesquely, hands reaching out for help from relief camps, and the shallow proclamations of those in power who cynically play about with human lives, indifferent to the cost of human tragedy. (2) The churches in India, which comprise the ancient Orthodox churches, the Catholic church, various Protestant denominations and a wide range of Pentecostal churches, are left bewildered and forlorn as they wonder how best to carry out their calling to be active and committed peace-makers in the present context. What does the proclamation of the gospel of reconciliation and peace mean in such a context? How can the churches co-operate in helping in relief and rebuilding measures? How can the churches display charity while speaking the truth in love to power? The discourse on secularism The reality of life in India has led to a flurry of analysis of the nation, religion and the life of the religious communities in Indian society at the turn of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. (3) The investigation and exploration of secularism in India has led to significantly different ways in which secularism is understood from how it is normally understood in the West. In the West, secularism has been understood to incorporate (more or less) the following elements: * the attempt to separate religion and religious authorities from the structures of the state, including politics; * the sphere of religion being recognized as essentially a private matter; * the recognition of the reality of the declining importance of religion in public, civil and social life. (4) Such an understanding led to the existence of a division between religion and the state, and the separation of national identity from religious affiliations of any kind...Secularization not only polarizes national and religious identity; it also privatizes belief and renders it subordinate to the claims of reason, logic, and evidence, all of which are hence identified with the administrative rationality of the state and its institutions. (5) If this is the classical understanding, then we need to note that, Indians are sometimes scolded for misunderstanding secularism. …

Lebendige Schrift: Reprasentation und Idolatrie in Moses Mendelssohns Philosophie und Exegese des Judentums (review)

Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2000. 188 pp.This book is methodologically guided by Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology and Roland Barthes's semiology and participates in both the strengths and weaknesses of those approaches to texts. In language that is often arresting and precise, it jars and reorients one's reading and thinking, destabilizing what might be termed more conventional interpretations of Mendelssohn's work. But in point of conceptual lucidity it does always lead to an advance, and by its refusal to examine what is outside the text important considerations with respect to Mendelssohn's intentions and actions are ignored.The author constantly reiterates that Mendelssohn's writings, and his conceptualization of the practice of writing, translation, and commentary, constitute a form of resistance to established hierarchical cultural traditions in Europe, especially in philosophy. But reiteration (a term which the author claims is central to Mendelssohn's sceptical semiology) does quickly clarify the quality of this resistance, and it is only toward the end of the book that this becomes somewhat more comprehensible. Nonetheless, the effort to describe and analyze Mendelssohn's work through the notion of resistance does lead one, as the author wishes, to rethink many categories of both Jewish and Western thought, including those of representation, truth, text, difference, revelation, and freedom.Hilfrich argues that Mendelssohn's writing praxis was unsystematic, shifting from philosophy to exegesis, from Hebrew to German to create an oeuvre that is self-consciously transdisciplinary and eclectic. Thus Mendelssohn's principal writings -- the dialogue Phaedon, the translation of the Hebrew Bible, the commentary on Maimonides' logic and the essay Jerusalem -- intermingle the Hebrew and German languages, even transcribing German into Hebrew letters, in an effort to entwine biblical and rabbinic tradition with modern literary and philosophical reflections (p. 33). Mendelssohn performed, or rather lived, a high-wire act (Seiltanzertum) which was followed by all those participating in the dialogue of modernity (p. 43) up to the time of Kafka, after which the dialogue seems to have broken down. In this way, Hilfrich claims, Mendelssohn carried out resistance to efforts to impose a false, chiliastic unity in the spheres of religion, language, and culture. Furthermore, he resisted the doxa of orthodox as well as heterodox thinking in both Jewish and German culture by highlighting, in various ways, the problematic of otherness -- the supreme crisis of the epoch.Unfortunately the problem of otherness, though frequently mentioned, is adequately characterized by Hilfrich. Here it would have been helpful, even for the reader who has some acquaintance with Mendelssohn's work and the history of European and Jewish culture in the Enlightenment period, if Hilfrich had analyzed the crisis in greater specificity and detail. Instead she confines her analysis of the notion of otherness in German-Jewish relations to a dialectical treatment of two texts, the Forschen nach Licht und Recht (1782) by a fairly obscure Christian writer and Mendelssohn's Jerusalem. The entire political and cultural conjuncture of European Jewry, its political and social otherness, is thus seen through this dialectic, an approach which this reviewer finds less than instructive. Nor is the notion of otherness within the Jewish community explored. Yet the text of Jerusalem, with its themes (among others) of freedom of thought and civil rights for minorities, was addressed only to Germans and other Europeans, but also to the Jewish people of Prague, Vilna, and elsewhere, who were living and thinking in very different ways from Mendelssohn's own community in Berlin. Although Hilfrich fleetingly mentions the reception of Mendelssohn's Bible translation as not kosher by some, this point is left undeveloped; surely it is quite important to the thesis of Mendelssohn's resistance to established authority. …

Observations on Animals and on Animal Physiology in Herodotus' The Histories: Facts and Fancies

OBSERVATIONS ON ANIMALS AND ON ANIMAL PHYSIOLOGY IN HERODOTUS' THE HISTORIES: FACTS AND FANCIES WOLFGANG JOCHEE * Herodotus (484?-425bc ) , the Greek historian, was born at Halicarnassus on the Southwest coast ofAsia Minor. Little is known about his life's history beyond the fact that his book TheHistories is based on his travels throughout the entire ancient Middle East, including Egypt and Libya. He came to Athens in 447 bc and settled in 443 bc in the Panhellenic colony ofThuri in southern Italy. His Histories (Greek for "inquiry") is the first comprehensive attempt at secular narrative history, and the first known creative work written in prose. Since it is the starting point of western historical writing, Herodotus is called the "Father of History." Although much of his books are concerned with the Persian Wars of the (then) recent past, his comprehensive writings about the world he saw, experienced, and explored make him also the first anthropologist and an indispensable source of information on the medicine of antiquity [I]. In addition, his writings are interspersed with observations on animals and on animal physiology, especially reproductive biology. To the layperson, these observations seem an odd mixture of facts and fantasies, some familiar, some sensational, some obviously misinterpreted , and many strange to us. To a veterinary scientist and theriogenologist , many of these observations are astonishingly close to the understanding we have today about the biological or physiological phenomena Herodotus described. Prior to Herodotus, information about biological phenomena known to antiquity had to be extracted from mythology. Early recordings of mythology have preserved, often in ingenious disguises, many empirical, prescientific observations, including very apt insights into reproductive biology of human and animals [2-4] . My interest in this subject was kindled by 40 *10 Boonton Road, Denville, NJ 07834.© 1999 by The University of Chicago. AU rights reserved. 0031-5982/99/4204-1112$01.00 496 Wolfgangfächle ¦ Observations on Animals years ofprofessional activities, which required me to stay abreast ofdevelopments in reproductive biology in general, and of the physiological aspects of animal and human reproduction specifically. Taken together, this has led me over the last decades to critically read Herodotus' Histories as another source ofrelevant information from antiquity and to its reassessment in the light ofwhat science today knows about these subjects. This allowed organizing, tentatively, those items selected for presentation below under separate headings of "Facts" and "Fancies." Facts are observations modern science can corroborate, or observations coming close to modern knowledge. Fancies are those observations modern science can not corroborate and which often are clearlywrong but equally puzzling, since observations to the contrary could easily have been made. Some observations are mystifying, and some belong into the sphere ofreligion and faith and therefore are removed from the realm ofscientific explanations. But their importance for the evolution of religions and the carryover of their pattern into the faith of our days indicate the need for their inclusion into this assessment . The reader and researcher not having command of the ancient Greek runs into the problem of translations, especially if, like in this project, two modern translations into German and the most widely accepted version in English are used [5-7] . Translators are not biologists, and hence their interpretations of important details may vary. For example, when talking about milking mares, blowing of air into the vagina was used to ensure the letdown of milk; this act is described variously as blowing "into the genital parts of the mares" [5], as "blowing in from behind" [6], or as "blowing into the anus" [7] . Another example, unrelated to animals, is nevertheless illuminating: a funeral arrangement talks of "twenty naked wooden figures " [7], or of"about 20 lightly clad figures" [5] , or of"about 20 wooden, large naked female figures' ' [6] . Clad or naked remains unresolved. Facts: Observations Modern Science can Corroborate fertile mule mares After the Persian fleet had sailed for Samos, Babylon revolted. When the news reached Darius, he marched against them . . . and laid siege to die city. The Babylonians . . . were unimpressed . . . and hurled insulting jibes at Darius, . . . calling out: ..."Oh yes, you will capture our city—when mules have foals.'' Whoever made this remark, naturally supposed that no mule would ever have a...

Unity, Pluralism, and the Spiritual Market-Place: Interdenominational Competition in the Early American Republic

Following independence, Americans’ sense of the special status of their new nation drew succour not merely from their republican experiment but from the unique character of the nation’s religious life. Even before the Revolution Americans had witnessed an extraordinary proliferation of sects and churches, to a degree unparalleled in any single European state, as ethnic diversity increased and the mid-eighteenth-century revivals split churches and multiplied congregations. The Congregationalist establishment in New England and Anglican power in the middle and southern colonies uneasily confronted energetic dissenting minorities, including Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, English Baptists, and German Lutheran and Reformed groups. After 1776 it took some time to define a new relationship between church and state. Colonial habits of thought persisted and prompted schemes of multiple establishment or government support for religion in general. The Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom in 1786 and, five years later, the First Amendment to the Federal Constitution did not succeed wholly in eliminating state authority from the sphere of religion; indeed, residual establishments persisted in Connecticut until 1818 and in Massachusetts until 1833. Yet an important shift was under way towards a ‘voluntary’ system of religious support, in which governmental authority in religion was replaced by increased authority for self-sustaining denominational bodies. After 1790 ecclesiastical institutions grew at an extraordinary pace, shaping the era labelled by historians the ‘Second Great Awakening’. As Jon Butler has reminded us, some 50,000 new churches were built in America between 1780 and 1860, sacralizing the landscape with steeples and graveyards and creating a heterogeneous presence that drew streams of European visitors curious to evaluate the effects of America’s unique experiment in ‘voluntarism’. By 1855 over four million of the country’s twenty-seven million people were members of one of over forty Protestant denominations, most of them recognizable by name as churches with an Old World ancestry but with features which made them distinctively American. Additionally, there were over one million Catholics.

信仰者の分布パターンからみた笠間稲荷信仰圏の地域区分

本研究では,笠間稲荷神社(茨城県笠間市)の信仰者の分布から,信仰圏の範囲を画定し,信仰圏の地域区分を行なった.分布の指標には,昇殿祈願者(講社および篤信崇敬者),産物献納者,,分霊勧請者の3つを用いた. その結果,笠間稲荷からの距離に応じて,笠間稲荷信仰圏は,(1)産物献納者の分布が卓越し,農耕に恵みを与える生産神としての信仰を集める第1次信仰圏(0～50km圏),(2)各指標とも分布が密であり,・とくに講:社の成立と分霊勧請者の分布の中心域で,、笠間稲荷信仰の核心地域といえる第2次信仰圏(50～150km圏),(3)講社,分霊勧請者とも分布が分散的となり,笠間稲荷信仰の外縁地域となる第3次信仰圏(150～800km圏)の3つに地域区分ができることが明らかとなった. また笠間稲荷信仰圏の場合,信仰の広がりには,神社の西部から南東部にかけてのセクター性もみられ,笠間稲荷信仰圏が,信仰拠点を中心とする圏構造ではなく,第2次信仰圏に信仰者の分布の中核のあるドーナツ型を呈していることがわかった.

Rock mechanics developments in India

INTRODUCTION India has been the seat of a great civilisation for 5000 yr or more. The ancient civilisation was manifested in the spheres of religion, art, literature, music and sculpture-all these having been imprinted into various monuments constructed through the ages. The country is dotted with thousands of monuments, which include temples, Buddhist Stupas, Chaityas, mosques, minars, rock cut caves and forts. Many of these are of considerable antiquity dating back 1000yr or more. These rock cut caves not only reflect the rich cultural life of the ancient and medieval people but also show their high technical skill in engineering construction and profound knowledge in the selection of sites, judgement of foundation conditions and choice of construction material. Revolutionary thoughts and a dynamic approach in utilizing in situ rock or the rock mass soon gave birth to the rock cut architecture in India which now holds a glorious record of having nearly 1200 rock-cut structures constructed between the 3rd century B.C. and the 9th century A.D. In the construction of such rock-cut structures, a knowledge of the correct selection of the site, including the character of the rocks which are amenable to the sculptor's chisel and hammer, was vital. The world famous rock-cut temples of Ajanta and Ellora, a treasure trove of art, were chiselled out of the very resistant Deccan basalt at suitable sites. One of the underground chambers in the Ajanta caves is 21 x 15 m and at the Ellora caves, the Chitya Hall measures 26 x 14 x 10 m. Some of these caves are built in 3 storeys. The rock has been supported by pillars at suitable locations and left unsupported wherever the rock was self-supporting. From the methods of excavation (by pickaxes, chisel and hammer) and support which followed, it seems likely that the ancient builders had sufficient knowledge of the principle of single and multiple beams and the cantilever system for distributing the load. Besides the underground construction, architectural masterpieces with stone as building material can be found throughout India. Some of the notable examples are:

Problems of Ethnosemiotics

In researching exchange as an "integral social fact," Mauss and his school, as well as Hocart and Needham, came to the conclusion that in ancient times there existed a nondifferentiated society, in which the exchange of social and material values (including "the exchange of partners"—i.e., spouses—according to Lévi-Strauss), ritualized mutual relations, and activity equivalent to the arts in contemporary society are regarded as virtually indistinguishable from one another. At the present time, it is possible to believe that in phylogenesis (species history), development of human sign systems takes place by means of a growth in the number of various systems breaking away from some hypothetical single system.1 Such a universal or integral sign system simultaneously had functions that partially corresponded to those that would later be performed by linguistic, ritual, religious, scientific, and artistic systems. Natural language, the language of gestures, and other kinds of information, later becoming specialized as individual arts, writing, and so on, belong to the realm of this universal system.2 Early religion and early mythology constituted its content. One of the important ethnological discoveries is the establishment of the unity of early religion and early science. An analogue of this "syncretic" (in the spirit of Veselovskii's definition of the early syncretism of the arts)3 sign system is the comparably universal system identified by Mauss in early exchange: "This early form of exchange is not exclusively or in its very essence economic, but places us before what he (Mauss—V.I.) correctly refers to as an "integral social fact," that is, a fact laden simultaneously with social and religious, magical and economic, utilitarian, feeling-oriented, legal, and moral meaning."4 In describing a society of such an "integral" type, one ought to avoid attempts to transfer to it that specialization of functions (including esthetic ones) that have evolved in contemporary societies thanks to the long-term development of sign systems that comprise culture as a whole. It is obvious that those functions that are divided among the spheres of religion, medicine, dance, drama, and certain other arts in any European society are combined into one in the séances of a Siberian or American Indian shaman.a In exactly the same way, the rules regulating exchange (in the broad sense indicated) among certain Australian (and, to some extent, North American Indian) tribes may be essential for the geographic distribution of labor and its products,5 the establishment of preferential or prescriptive marital unions, and the definition of a spatial model of the composition of the tribe and the structure of the world, as reflected in monuments of the arts as well. As has been established in the latest works of ethnologists, a society with "obligatory" rules for marital unions is characterized by the unity of its system of relationships, which can be seen to differing extents in the realm of "symbolic classification," i.e. in the fundamental semiotic oppositions of the male—female, right—left, red—black, etc. type,6 and in the realm of social organization, this type of society is an example of an "integral social system"; therefore, isolating the economic, political, legal, and religious frameworks may be incorrect, and even inconvenient for description. More likely, the subject of our examination is an integral process organized within the framework of a unified schema of symbolic classification.7 Specifically, in a society with a dual organization, this latter is directly reflected in paired semiotic oppositions associated with two phratries, their two mythical (twin) forefathers,8 and so on. These oppositions determine the structure of the world and the set of ritual actions and restrictions through which all social life is regimented.

Fascism as Political Religion

In modern society, secularization has not produced a definitive separation between the spheres of religion and politics. With the development of mass politics, the boundaries between these two spheres have often become confused, and on these occasions politics has assumed its own religious dimension. At the same time as this process of secularization within both the state and society, there has also been a 'sacralization of politics', which reached its highest point in the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century. Nazism, fascism and romantic nationalism all made decisive contributions to the 'sacralization of politics'; but democracy, socialism and communism have also contributed to the birth of new secular cults. The religious aspects of mass movements such as nazism have already been studied, whilst we do not yet have an in-depth study of fascism from this point of view. This article does not claim to provide such a study; merely to put forward some considerations on the importance and function of political religion within fascism. There has always been an interest in this field: as early as the 1920s some researchers focused their attention on fascism's rituals and symbols, claiming that they were examples of a secular religiousness, which they viewed as one of the more original aspects of the movement, as well as being one of the factors behind its success. Fascism 'has the rudiments of a new religion', wrote Schneider and Clough in 1929, but 'whether or not these will grow remains to be seen, but certainly there can be no doubt that already this new cult has taken some hold of the Italians' heart and imagination'.' In 1932, Mussolini declared that the fascist state had not created its own god, as Robespierre had done, but it had recognized 'the god of ascetics, saints and heroes, and also the God which is seen and worshipped by the primitive and genuine heart of the people'. He also added that whilst the fascist state did not have its own theology, it did have its own morality.2

Cornelius Nepos, ‘Atticus’ and the Roman Revolution

The biography of Atticus by Cornelius Nepos, covering the last eight decades of the Republic and written at the precise moment of the establishment of monarchy by Octavian, ought always to have been treated both as one of the best introductions to the period, and as an exposition, from a unique angle, of some of the values expressed in Roman society. But now, more than ever, there may be a place for a brief essay which attempts to bring out both some values exhibited in this particular text and the way in which these were taken up, distorted, and deployed in the propaganda of the Augustan regime. For, first, the larger background of late-Republican scholarship, antiquarianism, historiography, and biography has been fully explored by Elizabeth Rawson; second, Joseph Geiger has argued for the originality of Nepos as a writer of political biography; third, we have a major study of the ethical models which it is the purpose of the biography to hold up for emulation. Finally, John North, in an important review-article on recent works on Roman religion, has identified three significant characteristics of late-Republican religiosity: a scholarly or antiquarian perception of religious change, often seen as decline; the identification of religion as the subject of a particular form of discourse; and a shift in focus within the sphere of religion, from the community as a whole to great men within it. All three come together, as we will see below, in the passage of Nepos' biography in which he records how, some time in the 30s B.C., Atticus suggested to Octavian that the now roofless temple of Juppiter Feretrius on the Capitol should be repaired.

Conflit symbolique et conflit social dans le champ religieux

In this article the authors' analyse — starting from an actual case — the repercussions of social conflict, in the religious sphere. The theoretical aspect of the work is aimed at showing how the sphere of religion both translates and transforms the political ideologies of conflicting groups. This leads on to an analysis of religious ideologies to indicate how groups use the sphere of religion according to their political interests. In the. course of the article the authors' demonstrate how the process of discussion is in fact an occasion of conflict, produced and used according to the positions occupied by the groups concerned both in the fields, of religion and politics. Understanding of these situations requires an analysis of symbolic. systems combined with a sociological theory of power.